Next-Gen CASB Blog

Praise for secure native email on Blackberry

IT professionals in the healthcare industry have long sought a solution that enables secure BYOD for hospital employees and all affiliates. Many independent physicians, however, don't want invasive agents on their devices, but still need access to patient records and other sensitive data. It's this push and pull between user needs and compliance requirements that has forced many in the healthcare industry to install cumbersome third-party applications on their personal mobile devices simply to access email.

Dissatisfaction with Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) is rampant, and when end-users praise a mobile security product, IT should take note.

In a Blackberry user forum, we noticed one physician's review of a hospital's switch from Citrix WorxMail to Bitglass. This independent physician works closely with one of our customers - a large regional hospital system - and prefaces his blog post by noting that he has staff privileges at several area hospitals, a common occurance in the industry. Each, he notes, has its own email system.

This physician has to manage email across six different accounts, each of which requires a separate app for secure access, a situation he describes as "not ideal", adding, "I can't believe anyone would want to get their email each time through an app." As a long-time Blackberry user, he wanted native email access, integrated with the Blackberry hub, but there was no native mail support to be found with WorxMail. In fact, the hospital's IT department was surprised to learn that third-party email software from Citrix works on Blackberry, implying that they had no intent to support the platform's small but dedicated userbase.

With the Bitglass mobile solution, this hospital system was able to provide secure email access to affiliates like this independent physician without agents, profiles, or requiring a cumbersome third-party application. The Bitglass solution also works across all platforms that support Microsoft ActiveSync, a plus for this long-time Blackberry customer.

The hospital system's switch to Bitglass to drive adoption of BYOD gets at the heart of the problem facing the healthcare industry - traditional solutions like MDM and MAM don't fulfill all user needs and can't support all devices. End-users want a great native experience and to access data on any device, anywhere, regardless of platform. In the words of the independent physician, the Bitglass solution is "working flawlessly".